The Curriculum Policies Project

Full description

The Curriculum Policies Project (http://scpp.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/) dataset contains a series of 17 transcripts of interviews with 19 state curriculum experts and education policymakers, as part of the ARC Discovery project 'School Knowledge, Working Knowledge and the Knowing Subject: A Review of State Curriculum Policies 1975–2005,' based at the University of Melbourne.

Responding to a noted dearth of systematic scholarship about the development of state curriculum policies, the Curriculum Policies project aimed to produce a foundation picture of developments in curriculum policies across the nation over a thirty-year period. The project provided a wide overview of the last generation of state curricula, moving past previous projects that were limited in scope to individual government reports, Commonwealth developments, subject areas or political contexts. The overarching focus of the project was on charting continuities and changes in state curriculum policies, especially regarding changing approaches to knowledge, to students, and to the marking out of academic and vocational agendas. The focus was broadly on secondary schooling, and aimed at building up snapshots of curriculum changes at ten-year intervals.

As part of this research project, 34 public servants and education department officials, curriculum academics and scholars were interviewed by Lyn Yates and Cherry Collins over 2007 and 2008. 19 interviewees gave consent for the transcripts of their interviews to appear in this archive. Interviewees were asked to give their personal reflections on the broad changes in curriculum policy over the thirty years from 1975 to 2005, and were invited to shed light on the reasoning and institutional factors that lay behind various policy decisions. The interviews were broad-ranging, informal and largely open-ended; research participants were asked to give a general assessment of their own involvement in curriculum over the thirty years in question, and to highlight any landmarks that were significant to them. They were also invited to address the broader themes of the research study, namely changing attitudes to knowledge, to students and to academic/vocational agendas, and to similarities and differences between different the approaches taken in different states.